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J.J. ABRAMS

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STEVEN COW L E Y

ROBERT FISCHELL

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ALAIN DE B OT TO N

M I H A LY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI

PETER GABRIEL

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C H I M A M A N DA ADICHIE

RICHARD BRANSON

RICHARD D AW K I N S

A N TO N Y GARRETT LISI

BJARKE INGELS

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Z E R E S E N AY ALEMSEGED

DA N BUETTNER

AUBREY DE GREY

BILL G AT E S

JAMES B A LO G

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CHRIS ANDERSON

E D WA R D BURTYNSKY

C H R I STO P H E R DECHARMS

FRANK GEHRY

TIM JAC K S O N

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CAMERON CARPENTER

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M A LCO L M G L A DW E L L

CHRIS J O R DA N

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JAMES B A LO G

D AV I D CARSON

EDUARDO DOLHUN

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WILLIAM K A M K WA M B A

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RICHARD BARANIUK

NICHOLAS C H R I S TA K I S

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SALMAN KHAN

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D AV I D BLAINE

D AV I D CHRISTIAN

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BRIAN GREENE

JAMES H O WA R D KUNSTLER

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JOHANNA B L A K E LY

BILL C L I N TO N

JIM FA L L O N

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TED – THE NEXT CHAPTER

2014 marks TED’s 30th anniversary, and the theme for TED2014 is simply this: “The Next Chapter.” We’ll be seeking to understand what are truly the most significant developments of the last 30 years and applying that knowledge to understand what’s ahead. The theme makes it easy for us to reach out to the world’s greatest minds and challenge them to help shape a program better than any in our history — in an unforgettable custom theater designed for talk.

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B — 3 EDWARD BURTYNSKY

“If you want to be a Millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline.”

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o describe Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky’s work in a single adjective, you have to speak French: jolie-laide. His images of scarred landscapes – from mountains of tires to rivers of bright orange waste from a nickel mine – are eerily pretty yet ugly at the same time. Burtynsky’s large-format color photographs explore the impact of humanity’s expanding footprint and the substantial ways in which we’re reshaping the surface of the planet. His images powerfully alter the way we think about the world and our place in it.

With his blessing and encouragement, WorldChanging.com and others use his work to inspire ongoing global conversations about sustainable living. Burtynsky’s photographs are included in the collections of over 50 museums around the world, including the Tate, London and the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim in New York City. A large-format book, 2003’s Manufactured Landscapes, collected his work, and in 2007, a documentary based on his photography, also called Manufactured

Landscapes, debuted at the Toronto Film Festival before going on to screen at Sundance and elsewhere. It was released on dvd in March 2007. In 2008, after giving a talk at the Long Now Foundation, Burtynsky proposed “The 10,000 Year Gallery,” which could house art to be curated over thousands of years preserved through carbon transfers in an effort to reflect the attitudes and changes of the world over time.

When Burtynsky accepted his 2005 ted Prize, he made three wishes. One of his wishes: to build a website that will help kids think about going green. Thanks to wgbh and the ted community, the new site, Meet the Greens, debuted at ted 2007. His second wish: to begin work on an Imax film – and this work is now ongoing. And his third wish, wider in scope, was simply to encourage “a massive and productive worldwide conversation about sustainable living.” Thanks to his help and the input of the ted community, the site WorldChanging.com got an infusion of energy that has helped it to grow into a leading voice in the sustainability community.

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BIOGRAPHY

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started my journey 30 years ago. And I worked in mines. And I realized that this was a world unseen. And I wanted, through color and large format cameras and very large prints, to make a body of work that somehow became symbols of our use of the landscape, how we use the land. And to me this was a key component that somehow, through this medium of photography, which allows us to contemplate these landscapes, that I thought photography was perfectly suited to doing this type of work.

And after 17 years of photographing large industrial landscapes, it occurred to me that oil is underpinning the scale and speed. Because that is what has changed, is the speed at which we’re taking all our resources. And so then I went out to develop a whole series on the landscape of oil.

And what I want to do is to kind of map an arc that there is extraction, where we’re taking it from the ground, refinement. And that’s one chapter.

The other chapter that I wanted to look at was how we use it – our cities, our cars, our

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motorcultures, where people gather around the vehicle as a celebration. And then the third one is this idea of the end of oil, this entropic end, where all of our parts of cars, our tires, oil filters, helicopters, planes – where are the landscapes where all of that stuff ends up?

And to me, again, photography was a way in which I could explore and research the world, and find those places. And another idea that I had as well, that was brought forward by an ecologist – he basically did a calculation where he took one liter of gas and said, well, how much carbon it would take, and how much organic material? It was 23 metric tons for one liter. So whenever I fill up my gas, I think of that liter, and how much carbon.

And I know that oil comes from the ocean and phytoplankton, but he did the calculations for our Earth and what it had to do to produce that amount of energy. From the photosynthetic growth, it would take 500 years of that growth to produce what we use, the 30 billion barrels we use per year.

And that also brought me to the fact that this poses such a risk to our society. Looking at 30 billion per year, we look at our two largest suppliers, Saudi Arabia and now Canada, with its dirty oil. And together they only form about 15 years of supply. The whole world, at 1.2 trillion estimated reserves, only gives us about 45 years.

So, it’s not a question of if, but a question of when peak oil will come upon us.

So, to me, using photography – and I feel that all of us need to now begin to really take the task of using our talents, our ways of thinking, to begin to deal with what I think is probably one of the most challenging issues of our time, how to deal with our energy crisis.

And I would like to say that, on the other side of it, 30, 40 years from now, the children that I have, I can look at them and say, “We did everything we possibly, humanly could do, to begin to mitigate this, what I feel is one of the most important and critical moments in our time.

Thank you. (Applause)

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B — 3 EDWARD BURTYNSKY

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THREE UNUSUAL MEDICAL INVENTIONS

F I G H T I N J U S T I C E W I T H R AW V I D E O

A THEORY OF EVERYTHING

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R E L I G I O N , E V O L U T I O N , A N D T H E E C S TA S Y O F S E L F -T R A N S C E N D E N C E

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D — 6 MALCOLM GLADWELL

M A LCO L M G L A DW E L L

“There is no perfect mustard or imperfect mustard.

There are only different kinds of mustards that suit different kinds of people.”

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we have underestimated the value of adversity and over-estimated the value of privilege.

He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has won a national magazine award and been honored by the American Psychological Society and the American Sociological Society.

He was previously a reporter for The Washington Post. Malcolm is an extraordinary speaker: always on target, aware of the context and the concerns of the audience, informative and practical, poised, eloquent and warm and funny.

He has an unsurpassed ability to be both entertaining and challenging.

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BIOGRAPHY

D — 6 MALCOLM GLADWELL

alcolm Gladwell is the author of five New York Times bestsellers — The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and now, his latest, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants.

He has been named one of the 100 most influential people by time magazine and one of the Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers.

He has explored how ideas spread in the Tipping Point, decision making in Blink, and the roots of success in Outliers. With his latest book, David and Goliath, he examines our understanding of the advantages of disadvantages, arguing that

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think I was supposed to talk about my new book, which is called “Blink,” and it’s about snap judgments and first impressions. And it comes out in January, and I hope you all buy it in triplicate. But I was thinking about this, and I realized that although my new book makes me happy, and I think would make my mother happy, it’s not really about happiness. So I decided instead, I would talk about someone who I think has done as much to make Americans happy as perhaps anyone over the last 20 years, a man who is a great personal hero of mine: someone by the name of Howard Moskowitz, who is most famous for reinventing spaghetti sauce.

Howard’s about this high, and he’s round, and he’s in his 60s, and he has big huge glasses and thinning grey hair, and he has a kind of wonderful exuberance and vitality, and he has a parrot, and he loves the opera, and he’s a great aficionado of medieval history. And by profession, he’s a psychophysicist. Now, I should tell you that I have no idea what psychophysics is, although at some point in my life, I dated a girl for two years who was getting her doctorate in psychophysics.

Which should tell you something about that relationship. (Laughter) As far as I know, psychophysics is about measuring things. And Howard is very interested

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We want to know: what’s the sweet spot between eight and 12?” Now, if I gave you this problem to do, you would all say, it’s very simple. What we do is you make up a big experimental batch of Pepsi, at every degree of sweetness -- eight percent, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, all the way up to 12 -- and we try this out with thousands of people, and we plot the results on a curve, and we take the most popular concentration. Right? Really simple.

Howard does the experiment, and he gets the data back, and he plots it on a curve, and all of a sudden he realizes it’s not a nice bell curve. In fact, the data doesn’t make any sense. It’s a mess. It’s all over the place. Now, most people in that business, in the world of testing food and such, are not dismayed when the data comes back a mess. They think, well, you know, figuring out what people think about cola’s not that easy. You know, maybe we made an error somewhere along the way. You know, let’s just make an educated guess, and they simply point and they go for 10 percent, right in the middle. Howard is not so easily placated.

Howard is a man of a certain degree of intellectual standards. And this was not good enough for him, and this question bedevilled him for years. And he would think it through and say, what was wrong?

Why could we not make sense of this experiment with Diet Pepsi?

And one day, he was sitting in a diner in White Plains, about to go trying to dream up some work for Nescafe. And suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, the answer came to him. And that is, that when they analyzed the Diet Pepsi data, they were asking the wrong question. They were looking for the perfect Pepsi, and they should have been looking for the perfect Pepsis. Trust me. This was an enormous revelation. This was one of the most brilliant breakthroughs in all of food science. And Howard immediately went on the road, and he would go to conferences around the country, and he would stand up and he would say, “You had been looking for the perfect Pepsi. You’re wrong.

You should be looking for the perfect Pepsis.” And people would look at him with a blank look, and they would say, “What are you talking about?

This is craziness.” And they would say, you know, “Move! Next!” Tried to get business, nobody would hire him -- he was obsessed, though, and he talked about it and talked about it and talked about it.

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Howard loves the Yiddish expression “To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish.” This was his horseradish. (Laughter) He was obsessed with it!

And finally, he had a breakthrough. Vlasic Pickles came to him, and they said, “Mr. Moskowitz – Doctor Moskowitz – we want to make the perfect pickle.” And he said, “There is no perfect pickle; there are only perfect pickles.”

And he came back to them and he said, “You don’t just need to improve your regular; you need to create zesty.” And that’s where we got zesty pickles. Then the next person came to him, and that was Campbell’s Soup. And this was even more important. In fact, Campbell’s Soup is where Howard made his reputation. Campbell’s made Prego, and Prego, in the early ‘80s, was struggling next to Ragu, which was the dominant spaghetti sauce of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Now in the industry – I don’t know whether you care about this, or how much time I have to go into this. But it was, technically speaking – this is an aside – Prego is a better tomato sauce than Ragu. The quality of the tomato paste is much better; the spice mix is far superior; it adheres to the pasta in a much more pleasing way. In fact, they would do the famous bowl test back in the ‘70s with Ragu and Prego.

You’d have a plate of spaghetti, and you would pour it on, right? And the Ragu would all go to the bottom, and the Prego would sit on top. That’s called “adherence.” And, anyway, despite the fact that they were far superior in adherence, and the quality of their tomato paste, Prego was struggling.

So they came to Howard, and they said, fix us.

And Howard looked at their product line, and he said, what you have is a dead tomato society. So he said, this is what I want to do. And he got together with the Campbell’s soup kitchen, and he made 45 varieties of spaghetti sauce. And he varied them according to every conceivable way that you can vary tomato sauce: by sweetness, by level of garlic, by tartness, by sourness, by tomatoey-ness, by visible solids -- my favorite term in the spaghetti sauce business. (Laughter) Every conceivable way you can vary spaghetti sauce, he varied spaghetti sauce. And then he took this whole raft of 45 spaghetti sauces, and he went on the road. He went to New York; he went to Chicago; he went to Jacksonville; he went to Los Angeles. And he brought in people by the truckload. Into big halls.

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And he sat them down for two hours, and he gave them, over the course of that two hours, ten bowls. Ten small bowls of pasta, with a different spaghetti sauce on each one. And after they ate each bowl, they had to rate, from 0 to 100, how good they thought the spaghetti sauce was.

At the end of that process, after doing it for months and months, he had a mountain of data about how the American people feel about spaghetti sauce. And then he analyzed the data.

Now, did he look for the most popular brand variety of spaghetti sauce? No! Howard doesn’t believe that there is such a thing. Instead, he looked at the data, and he said, let’s see if we can group all these different data points into clusters.

Let’s see if they congregate around certain ideas.

And sure enough, if you sit down, and you analyze all this data on spaghetti sauce, you realize that all Americans fall into one of three groups. There are people who like their spaghetti sauce plain; there are people who like their spaghetti sauce spicy; and there are people who like it extra chunky.

And of those three facts, the third one was the most significant, because at the time, in the early 1980s, if you went to a supermarket, you would not find extra-chunky spaghetti sauce. And Prego turned to Howard, and they said, “You telling me that one third of Americans crave extra-chunky spaghetti sauce and yet no one is servicing their needs?” And he said yes! (Laughter) And Prego then went back, and completely reformulated their spaghetti sauce, and came out with a line of extra chunky that immediately and completely took over the spaghetti sauce business in this country. And over the next 10 years, they made 600 million dollars off their line of extra-chunky sauces.

And everyone else in the industry looked at what Howard had done, and they said, “Oh my god! We’ve been thinking all wrong!” And that’s when you started to get seven different kinds of vinegar, and 14 different kinds of mustard, and 71 different kinds of olive oil -- and then eventually even Ragu hired Howard, and Howard did the exact same thing for Ragu that he did for Prego.

And today, if you go to the supermarket, a really good one, and you look at how many Ragus there are -- do you know how many they are? 36! In six varieties: Cheese, Light, Robusto, Rich & Hearty, Old World Traditional, Extra-Chunky

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Garden. (Laughter) That’s Howard’s doing. That is Howard’s gift to the American people.

Now why is that important? It is, in fact, enormously important. I’ll explain to you why.

What Howard did is he fundamentally changed the way the food industry thinks about making you happy. Assumption number one in the food industry used to be that the way to find out what people want to eat -- what will make people happy -- is to ask them. And for years and years and years and years, Ragu and Prego would have focus groups, and they would sit all you people down, and they would say, “What do you want in a spaghetti sauce? Tell us what you want in a spaghetti sauce.” And for all those years -- 20, 30 years -- through all those focus group sessions, no one ever said they wanted extra-chunky. Even though at least a third of them, deep in their hearts, actually did. (Laughter) People don’t know what they want! Right? As Howard loves to say, “The mind knows not what the tongue wants.” It’s a mystery! And a critically important step in understanding our own desires and tastes is to realize that we cannot always explain what we want deep down. If I asked all of you, for example, in this room, what you want in a coffee, you know what you’d say? Every one of you would say, “I want a dark, rich, hearty roast.” It’s what people always say when you ask them what they want in a coffee. What do you like? Dark, rich, hearty roast! What percentage of you actually like a dark, rich, hearty roast? According to Howard, somewhere between 25 and 27 percent of you.

Most of you like milky, weak coffee. But you will never, ever say to someone who asks you what you want that “I want a milky, weak coffee.”

So that’s number one thing that Howard did.

Number two thing that Howard did is he made us realize -- it’s another very critical point -- he made us realize in the importance of what he likes to call “horizontal segmentation.” Why is this critical? It’s critical because this is the way the food industry thought before Howard. Right?

What were they obsessed with in the early ‘80s?

They were obsessed with mustard. In particular, they were obsessed with the story of Grey Poupon.

Right? Used to be, there were two mustards.

French’s and Gulden’s. What were they? Yellow mustard. What’s in yellow mustard? Yellow

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mustard seeds, turmeric, and paprika. That was mustard. Grey Poupon came along, with a Dijon.

Right? Much more volatile brown mustard seed, some white wine, a nose hit, much more delicate aromatics. And what do they do? They put it in a little tiny glass jar, with a wonderful enameled label on it, made it look French, even though it’s made in Oxnard, California. And instead of charging a dollar-fifty for the eight-ounce bottle, the way that French’s and Gulden’s did, they decided to charge four dollars. And then they had those ads, right? With the guy in the Rolls Royce, and he’s eating the Grey Poupon. The other Rolls Royce pulls up, and he says, do you have any Grey Poupon? And the whole thing, after they did that, Grey Poupon takes off! Takes over the mustard business!

And everyone’s take-home lesson from that was that the way to get to make people happy is to give them something that is more expensive, something to aspire to. Right? It’s to make them turn their back on what they think they like now, and reach out for something higher up the mustard hierarchy. A better mustard! A more expensive mustard! A mustard of more sophistication and culture and meaning. And Howard looked to that and said, that’s wrong!

Mustard does not exist on a hierarchy. Mustard exists, just like tomato sauce, on a horizontal plane. There is no good mustard or bad mustard.

There is no perfect mustard or imperfect mustard.

There are only different kinds of mustards that suit different kinds of people. He fundamentally democratized the way we think about taste. And for that, as well, we owe Howard Moskowitz a huge vote of thanks.

Third thing that Howard did, and perhaps the most important, is Howard confronted the notion of the Platonic dish. (Laughter) What do I mean by that? For the longest time in the food industry, there was a sense that there was one way, a perfect way, to make a dish. You go to Chez Panisse, they give you the red-tail sashimi with roasted pumpkin seeds in a something something reduction. They don’t give you five options on the reduction, right?

They don’t say, do you want the extra-chunky reduction, or do you want the -- no! You just get the reduction. Why? Because the chef at Chez Panisse has a Platonic notion about red-tail sashimi. This

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is the way it ought to be. And she serves it that way time and time again, and if you quarrel with her, she will say, “You know what? You’re wrong! This is the best way it ought to be in this restaurant.”

Now that same idea fueled the commercial food industry as well. They had a notion, a Platonic notion, of what tomato sauce was. And where did that come from? It came from Italy.

Italian tomato sauce is what? It’s blended; it’s thin.

The culture of tomato sauce was thin. When we talked about authentic tomato sauce in the 1970s, we talked about Italian tomato sauce. We talked about the earliest ragus, which had no visible solids, right? Which were thin, and you just put a little bit over it and it sunk down to the bottom of the pasta. That’s what it was. And why were we attached to that? Because we thought that what it took to make people happy was to provide them with the most culturally authentic tomato sauce, A; and B, we thought that if we gave them the culturally authentic tomato sauce, then they would embrace it. And that’s what would please the maximum number of people.

And the reason we thought that -- in other words, people in the cooking world were looking for cooking universals. They were looking for one way to treat all of us. And it’s good reason for them to be obsessed with the idea of universals, because all of science, through the 19th century and much of the 20th, was obsessed with universals.

Psychologists, medical scientists, economists were all interested in finding out the rules that govern the way all of us behave. But that changed, right?

What is the great revolution in science of the last 10, 15 years? It is the movement from the search

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for universals to the understanding of variability.

Now in medical science, we don’t want to know how necessarily -- just how cancer works, we want to know how your cancer is different from my cancer. I guess my cancer different from your cancer. Genetics has opened the door to the study of human variability. What Howard Moskowitz was doing was saying, this same revolution needs to happen in the world of tomato sauce. And for that, we owe him a great vote of thanks.

I’ll give you one last illustration of variability, and that is -- oh, I’m sorry. Howard not only believed that, but he took it a second step, which was to say that when we pursue universal principles in food, we aren’t just making an error; we are actually doing ourselves a massive disservice. And the example he used was coffee.

And coffee is something he did a lot of work with, with Nescafe. If I were to ask all of you to try and come up with a brand of coffee -- a type of coffee, a brew -- that made all of you happy, and then I asked you to rate that coffee, the average score in this room for coffee would be about 60 on a scale of 0 to 100. If, however, you allowed me to break you into coffee clusters, maybe three or four coffee clusters, and I could make coffee just for each of those individual clusters, your scores would go from 60 to 75 or 78. The difference between coffee at 60 and coffee at 78 is a difference between coffee that makes you wince, and coffee that makes you deliriously happy.

That is the final, and I think most beautiful lesson, of Howard Moskowitz: that in embracing the diversity of human beings, we will find a surer way to true happiness. Thank you.

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BJØRN LO M B O R G

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ROSS LOV E G R OV E

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AMORY LOV I N S

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JOHN M A E DA

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NIGEL MARSH

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WILLIAM M CDO NOUGH

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PA M E L A MEYER

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P R A N AV MISTRY

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VIK MUNIZ

RE-EXAMINING THE REMIX

G L O B A L P R I O R I T I E S B I G G E R T H A N C L I M AT E C H A N G E

O R G A N I C D E S I G N , I N S P I R E D B Y N AT U R E

WINNING THE OIL ENDGAME BUSINESS & ECONOMICS

MY JOURNEY IN DESIGN

H OW TO M A K E WO R K- L I F E B A L A N C E WO R K

C R A D L E TO C R A D L E D E S I G N

H OW TO S P OT A L I A R

M E E T T H E S I X T H S E N S E I N T E R AC T I O N

A R T W I T H W I R E , S U G A R , C H O C O L AT E A N D S T R I N G

ROSS LOV E G R OV E

F — 3 ROSS LOVEGROVE

The world we live in is not purely visual. For me it’s totally poly-sensorial so the tactile, sensual aspect of living in the work that I do is brought to the fore.

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had the right idea all along: Many of his pieces are inspired by principles of evolution and microbiology.

Delightedly crossing categories, Lovegrove has worked for clients as varied as Apple, Issey Miyake, Herman Miller and Airbus, and in 2005 he was awarded the World Technology Award for design. His personal artwork has been exhibited at MoMA in New York, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Design Museum in London.

Lovegrove’s astonishing objects are the result of an ongoing quest to create forms that, as he puts it, touch people’s soul.

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BIOGRAPHY

F — 3 ROSS LOVEGROVE

nown as “Captain Organic,” Ross Lovegrove embraces nature as the inspiration for his “fat-free” design. Each object he creates be it bottle, chair, staircase or car is reduced to its essential elements. His pieces offer minimal forms of maximum beauty.

Ross Lovegrove is truly a pioneer of industrial design. As founder of Studio X in the Notting Hill area of London, the Welsh-born designer has exuberantly embraced the potential offered by digital technologies. However, he blends his love of high tech with a belief that the natural world

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y name is Lovegrove. I only know nine Lovegroves, two of which are my parents. They are first cousins, and you know what happens when, you know – so there’s a terribly weird freaky side to me, which I’m fighting with all the time. So to try and get through today, I’ve kind of disciplined myself with an 18-minute talk. I was hanging on to have a pee.

I thought perhaps if I was hanging on long enough, that would guide me through the 18 minutes.

Okay. I am known as Captain Organic, and that’s a philosophical position as well as an aesthetic position. But today what I’d like to talk to you about is that love of form and how form can touch people’s soul and emotion. Not very long ago, not many thousands of years ago, we actually lived in caves, and I don’t think we’ve lost that coding system. We respond so well to form, but I’m interested in creating intelligent form. I’m not interested at all in blobism or any of that superficial rubbish that you see coming out as design. These – this artificially induced consumerism – I think it’s atrocious. My world is the world of people like Amory Lovins, Janine Benyus, James Watson. I’m in that world, but I work purely instinctively. I’m not a scientist. I could have been, perhaps, but I work in this world where I trust my instincts. So I am a 21st-century translator of technology into products that we use everyday and relate beautifully and naturally with.

And we should be developing things -- we should be developing packaging for ideas which elevate people’s perceptions and respect for the things that we dig out of the earth and translate into products for everyday use.

So, the water bottle. I’ll begin with this concept of what I call dna. dna: Design, Nature, Art. These are the three things that condition my world. Here is a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, 500 years ago, before photography. It shows how observation, curiosity and instinct work to create amazing art. Industrial design is the art form of the 21st century. People like Leonardo – there have not been many – had this amazingly instinctive curiosity. I work from a similar position. I don’t want to sound pretentious saying that, but this is my drawing made on a digital pad a couple of years ago – well into the 21st century, 500 years later. It’s my impression of water. Impressionism

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thinking. When I look at these things, they look pretty normal to me. But these things evolved over many years, and now what we’re trying to do – I get three weeks to design a telephone. How the hell do I do a telephone in three weeks, when you get these things that take hundreds of million years to evolve? How do you condense that? It comes back to instinct. I’m not talking about designing telephones that look like that, and I’m not looking at designing architecture like that. I’m just interested in natural growth patterns, and the beautiful forms that only nature really creates.

How that flows through me and how that comes out is what I’m trying to understand.

This is a scan through the human forearm. It’s then blown up through rapid prototyping to reveal the cellular structure. I have these in my office. My office is a mixture of the Natural History Museum and a nasa space lab. It’s a weird, kind of freaky place. This is one of my specimens. This is made – bone is made from a mixture of inorganic minerals and polymers. I studied cooking in school for four years, and in that experience, which was called “domestic science,” it was a bit of a cheap trick for me to try and get a science qualification.

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being the most valuable art form on the planet as we know it: 100 million dollars, easily, for a Monet.

I use, now, a whole new process. A few years ago I reinvented my process to keep up with people like Greg Lynn, Tom Main, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas – all these people that I think are persevering and pioneering with fantastic new ideas of how to create form. This is all created digitally.

Here you see the machining, the milling of a block of acrylic. This is what I show to the client to say, “That’s what I want to do.” At that point, I don’t know if that’s possible at all. It’s a seductor, but I just feel in my bones that that’s possible. So we go. We look at the tooling. We look at how that is produced. These are the invisible things that you never see in your life. This is the background noise of industrial design. That is like an Anish Kapoor flowing through a Richard Serra. It is more valuable than the product in my eyes. I don’t have one. When I do make some money, I’ll have one machined for myself.

This is the final product. When they sent it to me, I thought I’d failed. It felt like nothing. It has to feel like nothing. It was when I put the water in that I realized that I’d put a skin on water itself.

It’s an icon of water itself, and it elevates people’s perception of contemporary design. Each bottle is different, meaning the water level will give you a different shape. It’s mass individualism from a single product. It fits the hand. It fits arthritic hands. It fits children’s hands. It makes the product strong, the tessellation. It’s a millefiori of ideas. In the future they will look like that, because we need to move away from those type of polymers and use that for medical equipment and more important things, perhaps, in life.

Biopolymers, these new ideas for materials, will come into play in probably a decade. It doesn’t look as cool, does it? But I can live up to that. I don’t have a problem with that. I design for that condition, biopolymers. It’s the future.

I took this video in Cape Town last year. This is the freaky side coming out. I have this special interest in things like this which blow my mind.

I don’t know whether to, you know, drop to my knees, cry; I don’t know what I think. But I just know that nature improves with evergreater purpose that which once existed, and that strangeness is a consequence of innovative

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rugby team couldn’t understand, but anyway – this is a meringue. This is another sample I have. A meringue is made exactly the same way, in my estimation, as a bone. It’s made from polysaccharides and proteins. If you pour water on that, it dissolves.

Could we be manufacturing from foodstuffs in the future? Not a bad idea. I don’t know. I need to talk to Janine and a few other people about that, but I believe instinctively that that meringue can become something, a car – I don’t know.

I’m also interested in growth patterns: the unbridled way that nature grows things so you’re not restricted by form at all. These interrelated forms, they do inspire everything I do although I might end up making something incredibly simple. This is a detail of a chair that I’ve designed in magnesium. It shows this interlocution of elements and the beauty of kind of engineering and biological thinking, shown pretty much as a bone structure. Any one of those elements you could sort of hang on the wall as some kind of art object. It’s the world’s first chair made in magnesium. It cost 1.7 million dollars to develop.

It’s called “Go” by Bernhardt, usa. It went into Time magazine in 2001 as the new language of the 21st century. Boy. For somebody growing up in Wales in a little village, that’s enough. It shows how you make one holistic form, like the car industry, and then you break up what you need.

This is an absolutely beautiful way of working.

It’s a godly way of working. It’s organic and it’s essential. It’s an absolutely fat-free design, and when you look at it, you see human beings. Bless you. When that moves into polymers, you can change the elasticity, the fluidity of the form.

This is an idea for a gas-injected, one-piece polymer chair. What nature does is it drills holes in things. It liberates form. It takes away anything extraneous. That’s what I do. I make organic things which are essential. I don’t – and they look funky too – but I don’t set out to make funky things because I think that’s an absolute disgrace. I set out to look at natural forms. If you took the idea of fractal technology further, take a membrane, shrinking it down constantly like nature does – that could be a seat for a chair; it could be a sole for a sports shoe; it could be a car blending into seats. Wow. Let’s go for it. That’s the kind of stuff.

This is what exists in nature. Observation now

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on furniture typologies, but that’s not the end motivation. It’s made from aluminum, as opposed to aluminium, and it’s grown. It’s grown in my mind, and then it’s grown in terms of the whole process that I go through. This is two weeks ago in ccp in Coventry, who build parts for Bentleys and so on. It’s being built as we speak, and it will be on show in Phillips next year in New York. I have a big show with Phillips Auctioneers. When I see these animations, oh Jesus, I’m blown away. This is what goes on in my studio everyday. I walk – I’m traveling. I come back. Some guy’s got that on a computer – there’s this like, oh my goodness. So I try to create this energy of invention every day in my studio. This kind of effervescent, fully charged sense of soup that delivers ideas. Single-surface products. Furniture’s a good one. How you grow legs out of a surface. I would love to build this one day, and perhaps I’d like to build it also out of flour, sugar, polymer, wood chips – I don’t know, human hair. I don’t know. I’d love a go at that. I don’t know. If I just got some time. That’s the weird side coming out again, and a lot of companies don’t understand that. Three weeks ago I was with Sony in Tokyo. They said, “Give us the dream. What is our dream? How do we beat Apple?” I said, “Well you don’t copy Apple, that’s for sure.” I said, “You get into biopolymers.” They looked straight through me. What a waste. Anyway. (Laughter) No, it’s true. Fuck ‘em. Fuck ‘em. You know, I mean.

I’m delivering; they’re not taking. I’ve had this image 20 years. I’ve had this image of a water droplet for 20 years sitting on a hot bed. That is an image of a car for me. That’s the car of the future. It’s a water droplet. I’ve been banging on about this like I can’t believe. Cars are all wrong. I’m going to show you something a bit weird now. They laughed everywhere over the world I showed this. The only place that didn’t laugh was Moscow. Its cars are made from 30,000 components. How ridiculous is that? Couldn’t you make that from 300? It’s got a vacuum-formed, carbon-nylon pan. Everything’s holistically integrated. It opens and closes like a bread bin.

There is no engine. There’s a solar panel on the back, and there are batteries in the wheels.

They’re fitted like Formula One. You take them off your wall. You plug them in. Off you jolly well go.

A three-wheeled car: slow, feminine, transparent,

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allows us to bring that natural process into the design process every day. That’s what I do.

This is a show that’s currently on in Tokyo.

It’s called “Superliquidity.” It’s my sculptural investigation. It’s like 21st-century Henry Moore.

When you see a Henry Moore still, your hair stands up. There’s some amazing spiritual connect.

If he was a car designer, phew, we’d all be driving one. In his day, he was the highest taxpayer in Britain. That is the power of organic design. It contributes immensely to our sense of being, our sense of relationships with things, our sensuality and, you know, the sort of – even the sort of socioerotic side, which is very important.

This is my artwork. This is all my process. These actually are sold as artwork. They’re very big prints.

But this is how I get to that object. Ironically, that object was made by the Killarney process, which is a brand-new process here for the 21st century, and I can hear Greg Lynn laughing his socks off as I say that. I’ll tell you about that later. When I look into these data images, I see new things. I’m self – it’s self-inspired. Diatomic structures, radiolaria, the things that we couldn’t see but we can do now – these, again, are cored out. They’re made virtually from nothing. They’re made from silica. Why not structures from cars like that? Coral, all these natural forces, take away what they don’t need and they deliver maximum beauty. We need to be in that realm. I want to do stuff like that.

This is a new chair which should come on the market in September. It’s for a company called Moroso in Italy. It’s a gas-injected polymer chair.

Those holes you see there are very filtered-down, watered-down versions of the extremity of the diatomic structures. It goes with the flow of the polymer and you’ll see – there’s an image coming up right now that shows the full thing. It’s great to have companies in Italy who support this way of dreaming. If you see the shadows that come through that, they’re actually probably more important than the product, but it’s the minimum it takes. The coring out of the back lets you breathe. It takes away any material you don’t need and it actually garners flexure too, so – I was going to break into a dance then.

This is some current work I’m doing. I’m looking at single-surface structures and how they flow – how they stretch and flow. It’s based

so you can see the people in there. You drive different. (Laughter) You see that thing. You do.

You do and not anaesthetized, separated from life.

There’s a hole at the front, and there’s a reason for that. It’s a city car. You drive along. You get out.

You drive on to a proboscis. You get out. It lifts you up. It presents the solar panel to the sun, and at night it’s a street lamp. (Applause) That’s what happens if you get inspired by the street lamp first, and then do the car second. These bubbles – I can see these bubbles with these hydrogen packages, floating around on the ground driven by AI. When I showed this in South Africa, everybody after was going, “Yeah, hey, car on a stick. Like this.” Can you imagine? A car on a stick. If you put it next to contemporary architecture, it feels totally natural to me. And that’s what I do with my furniture. I’m not putting Charles Eames’ furniture in buildings anymore. Forget that. We move on. I’m trying to build furniture that fits architecture. I’m trying to build transportation systems. I work on aircraft for Airbus, the whole thing – I do all this sort of stuff trying to force these natural, inspired-by-nature dreams home.

I’m going to finish on two things.

This is the steriolithography of a staircase.

It’s a little bit of a dedication to James, James Watson. I built this thing for my studio. It cost me 250,000 dollars to build this. Most people go and buy the Aston Martin. I built this. This is the data that goes with that. Incredibly complex.

Took about two years, because I’m looking for fat-free design. Lean, efficient things. Healthy products. This is built by composites. It’s a single element which rotates around to create a holistic element, and this is a carbon-fiber handrail which

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kids coming -- lots and lots of kids coming. I’m a contaminator for all those children of investment bankers – wankers.

This – sorry – (Laughter) – that’s a solar seed.

It’s a concept for new architecture. That thing on the top is the world’s first solar-powered garden lamp – the first produced. Giles Revell should be talking here today – amazing photography of things you can’t see. The first sculptural model I made for that thing in Tokyo. Lots of stuff. There’s a little leaf chair – that golden looking thing is called “Leaf.” It’s made from Kevlar. On the wall is my book called “Supernatural,” which allows me to remember what I’ve done, because I forget.

There’s an aerated brick I did in Limoges last year, in Concepts for New Ceramics in Architecture.

[Unclear], working at three o’clock in the morning – and I don’t pay overtime.

Overtime is the passion of design, so join the club or don’t. (Laughter) No, it’s true. It’s true.

People like Tom and Greg – we’re traveling like you can’t – we fit it all in. I don’t know how we do it. Next week I’m at Electrolux in Sweden, then I’m in Beijing on Friday. You work that one out.

And when I see Ed’s photographs I think, why the hell am I going to China? It’s true. It’s true.

Because there’s a soul in this whole thing. We need to have a new instinct for the 21st century.

We need to combine all this stuff. If all the people who were talking over this period worked on a car together, it would be a joy, absolute joy. So there’s a new X-light system I’m doing in Japan.

There’s Tuareg shoes from North Africa. There’s a Kifwebe mask. These are my sculptures. A copper jelly mold. It sounds like some quiz show or something, doesn’t it? So, it’s going to end. Thank you, James, for your great inspiration. Thank you very much. (Applause)

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is only supported in two places. Modern materials allow us to do modern things. This is a shot in the studio. This is how it looks pretty much every day. You wouldn’t want to have a fear of heights coming down it. There is virtually no handrail. It doesn’t pass any standards. (Laughter) Who cares?

(Laughter) Yeah, and it has an internal handrail which gives it it’s strength. It’s this holistic integration.

That’s my studio. It’s subterranean. It’s in Notting Hill next to all the crap – you know, the prostitutes and all that stuff. It’s next to David Hockney’s original studio. It has a lighting system that changes throughout the day. My guys go out for lunch. The door’s open. They come back in, because it’s normally raining, and they prefer to stay in. This is my studio. Elephant skull from Oxford University, 1988. I bought that last year. They’re very difficult to find. I would -- if anybody’s got a whale skeleton they want to sell me, I’ll put it in the studio. So I’m just going to interject a little bit with some of the things that you’ll see in the video. It’s a homemade video, made it myself at three o’clock in the morning just to show you how my real world is. You never see that. You never see architects or designers showing you their real world.

This is called a “Plasnet.” It’s a biopolycarbonate new chair I’m doing in Italy.

World’s first bamboo bike with folding handlebars.

We should all be riding one of these. As China buys all these crappy cars, we should be riding things like this. Counterbalance. Like I say, it’s a cross between Natural History Museum and a nasa laboratory. It’s full of prototypes and objects.

It’s self-inspirational again. I mean, the rare times when I’m there, I do enjoy it. And I get lots of

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THE SUPRISING DECLINE IN VIOLENCE

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“Complaining is silly. Either act or forget.”

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with musicians David Byrne and Lou Reed. He is the author of the design monograph “Made You Look” which was published by Booth-Clibborn editions.

Solo shows on Sagmeister Inc’s work have been mounted in Zurich, Vienna, New York, Berlin, Japan, Osaka, Prague, Cologne, and Seoul.

He teaches in the graduate department of the School of Visual Arts in New York and has been appointed as the Frank Stanton Chair at the Cooper Union School of Art, New York. He has received a Grammy Award in 2005 in Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package category for art directing Once in a Lifetime box set by Talking Heads. He would also work on the 2008 David Byrne and Brian Eno album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.

His motto is “Design that needed guts from the creator and still carries the ghost of these guts in the final execution.” Sagmeister goes on a year-long sabbatical around every 7 years, where he does not take work from clients. He has just returned from one in Bali, Indonesia, he is resolute about this, even if the work is tempting, and has displayed this by declining an offer to design a poster for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Sagmeister spends the year experimenting with personal work and refreshing himself as a designer.

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BIOGRAPHY

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tefan Sagmeister (born 1962 in Bregenz, Austria) is a New York-based graphic designer and typographer. He has his own design firm, Sagmeister Inc in New York City. He has designed album covers for Lou Reed, OK Go, The Rolling Stones, David Byrne, Aerosmith and Pat Metheny.

Sagmeister studied graphic design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. He later received a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Pratt Institute in New York. He began his design career at the age of 15 at “Alphorn”, an Austrian Youth magazine, which is named after the traditional Alpine musical instrument. In 1991, he moved to Hong Kong to work the Leo Burnett’s Hong Kong Design Group. In 1993, he returned to New York to work Tibor Kalman’s M&Co design firm. His tenure there was short lived, as Kalman soon decided to retire from the design business to edit Colors magazine for the Benetton Group in Rome.

He then proceeded to form the New York based Sagmeister Inc. in 1993 and has since designed branding, graphics, and packaging for clients as diverse as the Rolling Stones, hbo, the Guggenheim Museum and Time Warner.

Sagmeister Inc. has employed designers including Martin Woodtli, and Hjalti Karlsson and Jan Wilker, who later formed Karlssonwilker.

Sagmeister is a long-standing artistic collaborator

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run a design studio in New York. Every seven years I close it for one year to pursue some little experiments, things that are always difficult to accomplish during the regular working year. In that year we are not available for any of our clients. We are totally closed. And as you can imagine, it is a lovely and very energetic time.

I originally had opened the studio in New York to combine my two loves, music and design.

And we created videos and packaging for many musicians that you know. And for even more that you’ve never heard of. As I realized, just like with many many things in my life that I actually love, I adapt to it. And I get, over time, bored by them.

And for sure, in our case, our work started to look the same. You see here a glass eye in a die cut of a book. Quite the similar idea, then, a perfume packaged in a book, in a die cut. So I decided to close it down for one year.

Also is the knowledge that right now we spend about in the first 25 years of our lives learning.

Then there is another 40 years that’s really reserved for working. And then tacked on at the end of it are about 15 years for retirement. And I thought it might be helpful to basically cut off five of those retirement years and intersperse them in between those working years. (Applause) That’s clearly enjoyable for myself. But probably even more important is that the work that comes out

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of these years flows back into the company, and into society at large, rather than just benefiting a grandchild or two.

There is a fellow TEDster who spoke two years ago, Jonathan Haidt, who defined his work into three different levels. And they rang very true for me. I can see my work as a job. I do it for money.

I likely already look forward to the weekend, on Thursdays. And I probably will need a hobby as a leveling mechanism. In a career I’m definitely more engaged. But at the same time there will be periods when I think is all that really hard work really worth my while? While in the third one, in the calling, very much likely I would do it also if I wouldn’t be financially compensated for it.

I am not a religious person myself, but I did look for nature. I had spent my first sabbatical in New York City. Looked for something different for the second one. Europe and the U.S. didn’t really feel enticing because I knew them too well.

So Asia it was. The most beautiful landscapes I had seen in Asia were Sri Lanka and Bali. Sri Lanka still had the civil war going on. So Bali it was. It’s a wonderful, very craft-oriented society.

I arrived there in September 2008, and pretty much started to work right away. There is wonderful inspiration coming from the area itself. However the first thing that I needed was mosquito repellent typography because they were

if I look at companies that are actually more successful than mine, 3M, since the 1930s is giving all their engineers 15 percent to pursue whatever they want. There is some good successes. Scotch tape came out of this program, as well as Art Fry developed sticky notes from during his personal time for 3M. Google, of course, very famously gives 20 percent for their software engineers to pursue their own personal projects.

Anybody in here has actually ever conducted a sabbatical? That’s about five percent of everybody. So I’m not sure if you saw your neighbor putting their hand up. Talk to them about if it was successful or not. I’ve found that finding out about what I’m going to like in the future, my very best way is to talk to people who have actually done it much better than myself envisioning it.

When I had the idea of doing one, the process was I made the decision and I put it into my daily planner book. And then I told as many, many people as I possibly could about it so that there was no way that I could chicken out later on.

In the beginning, on the first sabbatical, it was rather disastrous. I had thought that I should do this without any plan, that this vacuum of time somehow would be wonderful and enticing for idea generation. It was not. I just, without a plan, I just reacted to little requests, not work requests,

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definitely around heavily. And then I needed some sort of way to be able to get back to all the wild dogs that surround my house, and attacked me during my morning walks. So we created this series of 99 portraits on tee shirts. Every single dog on one tee shirt. As a little retaliation with a just ever so slightly menacing message (Laughter) on the back of the shirt. (Laughter) Just before I left New York I decided I could actually renovate my studio. And then just leave it all to them. And I don’t have to do anything.

So I looked for furniture. And it turned out that all the furniture that I really liked, I couldn’t afford. And all the stuff I could afford, I didn’t like. So one of the things that we pursued in Bali was pieces of furniture. This one, of course, still works with the wild dogs. It’s not quite finished yet. And I think by the time this lamp came about, (Laughter) I had finally made piece with those dogs. (Laughter) Then there is a coffee table. I also did a coffee table. It’s called Be Here Now. It includes 330 compasses. And we had custom espresso cups made that hide a magnet inside, and make those compasses go crazy, always centering on them.

Then this is a fairly talkative, verbose kind of chair. I also start meditating for the first time in my life in Bali. And at the same time, I’m extremely aware how boring it is to hear about other people’s happinesses. So I will not really go too far into it.

Many of you will know this tedster, Danny Gilbert, whose book, actually I got it through the TED book club. I think it took me four years to finally read it, while on sabbatical. And I was pleased to see that he actually wrote the book while he was on sabbatical. And I’ll show you a couple of people that did well by pursuing sabbaticals.

This is Ferran Adria. Many people think he is right now the best chef in the world with his restaurant north of Barcelona, elBulli. His restaurant is open seven months every year. He closes it down for five months to experiment with a full kitchen staff. His latest numbers are fairly impressive. He can seat, throughout the year, he can seat 8,000 people. And he has 2.2 million requests for reservations.

If I look at my cycle, seven years, one year sabbatical, it’s 12.5 percent of my time. And

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those I all said no to, but other little requests.

Sending mail to Japanese design magazines and things like that. So I became my own intern.

And I very quickly made a list of the things I was interested in, put them in a hierarchy, divided them into chunks of time and then made a plan, very much like in grade school. What does it say here? Monday eight to nine: story writing. Nine to ten: future thinking. Was not very successful. And so on and so forth. And that actually, specifically as a starting point of the first sabbatical, worked really well for me. What came out of it? I really got close to design again. I had fun. Financially, seen over the long term, it was actually successful. Because of the improved quality, we could ask for higher prices.

And probably most importantly, basically everything we’ve done in the seven years following the first sabbatical came out of thinking of that one single year. And I’ll show you a couple of projects that came out of the seven years following that sabbatical. One of the strands of thinking I was involved in was that sameness is so incredibly overrated. This whole idea that everything needs to be exactly the same works for a very very few strand of companies, and not for everybody else.

We were asked to design an identity for Casa de Musica, the Rem Koolhaas-built music center in Porto, in Portugal. And even though I desired to do an identity that doesn’t use the architecture, I failed at that. And mostly also because I realized out of a Rem Koolhaas presentation to the city of Porto where he talked about a conglomeration of various layers of meaning. Which I understood

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after I translated it from architecture speech in to regular English, basically as logo making. And I understood that the building itself was a logo.

So then it became quite easy. We put a mask on it, looked at it deep down in the ground, checked it out from all sides, west, north, south, east, top and bottom. Colored them in a very particular way by having a friend of mine write a piece of software, the Casa de Musica Logo Generator.

That’s connected to a scanner. You put any image in there, like that Beethoven image. And the software, in a second, will give you the Casa de Musica Beethoven logo. Which, when you actually have to design a Beethoven poster, comes in handy because the visual information of the logo and the actual poster, is exactly the same.

So it will always fits together, conceptually, of course. If Zappa’s music is performed, it gets its own logo. Or Philip Glass or Lou Reed or the Chemical Brothers who all performed there, get their own Casa de Musica logo. It works the same internally with the president or the musical director, whose Casa de Musica portraits wind up on their business cards. There is a full-blown orchestra living inside the building. It has a more transparent identity. The truck they go on tour with. Or there’s a smaller contemporary orchestra, 12 people that remixes its own title.

And one of the handy things that came about was that you could take the logo type and create advertising out of it. Like this Donna Toney poster, or Chopin, or Mozart, or La Monte Young.

You can take the shape and make typography out of it. You can grow it underneath the skin. You can have a poster for a family event in front of

number of the neighbors surrounding the plaza got very close to it and quite loved it. So when it was finally done, and in the first night a guy came with big plastic bags and scooped up as many coins as he could possibly carry, one of the neighbors called the police.

And the Amsterdam police in all their wisdom, came, saw, and they wanted to protect the artwork. And they swept it all up and put it into custody at police headquarters. (Laughter) I think you see, you see them sweeping. You see them sweeping right here. That’s the police, getting rid of it all. So after eight hours that’s pretty much all that was left of the whole thing. (Laughter) We are also working on the start of a bigger project in Bali. It’s a movie about happiness. And here we asked some nearby pigs to do the titles for us. They weren’t quite slick enough. So we asked the goose to do it again, and hoped she would do somehow, a more elegant or pretty job. And I think she overdid it. Just a bit too ornamental.

And my studio is very close to the monkey forest.

And the monkeys in that monkey forest looked, actually, fairly happy. So we asked those guys to do it again. They did a fine job, but had a couple of readability problems. So of course whatever you don’t really do yourself doesn’t really get done properly.

That film we’ll be working on for the next two years. So It’s going to be a while. And of course you might think that doing a film on happiness might not really be worthwhile, then you can of course always go and see this guy.

Video: (Laughter) And I’m happy I’m alive. I’m happy I’m alive. I’m happy I’m alive.

Stefan Sagmeister: Thank you. (Applause)

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the house, or a rave underneath the house, or a weekly program as well as educational services.

Second insight. So far, until that point I had been mostly involved or used the language ww was fine with me. On one hand I have nothing against selling. My parents are both sales people.

But I did feel that I spent so much time learning this language, why do I only promote with it?

There must be something else. And the whole series of work came out of it. Some of you might have seen it. I showed some of it at earlier teds before, under the title “Things I’ve Learned In My Life So Far”. I’ll just show two now.

This is a whole wall of bananas at different ripenesses on the opening day in this gallery in New York. It says, “Self confidence produces fine results.” This is after a week. After two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, five weeks. And you see the self confidence almost comes back, but not quite. These are some pictures visitors sent to me.

And then the city of Amsterdam gave us a plaza and asked us to do something. We used the stone plates as a grid for our little piece. We got 250 thousand coins from the central bank, at different darknesses. So we got brand new ones, shiny ones, medium ones, and very old, dark ones.

And with the help of 100 volunteers, over a week, created this fairly floral typography that spelled, “Obsessions make my life worse and my work better.”

And the idea of course was to make the type so precious that as an audience you would be in between, “Should I really take as much money as I can? Or should I leave the piece intact as it is right now?” While we built all this up during that week, with the hundred volunteers, a good

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